The invention relates to a wavefront-division polarimetric analysis device allowing to determine the polarisation state of a light beam.
The invention more particularly relates to a wavefront-division polarimetric analysis device for determining the polarisation states of the different source-points of an object or a light beam.
The invention also relates to a spectrometer, a camera or a microscope equipped with such a device.
The invention finally relates to a wavefront-division polarimetric analysis method for determining the polarisation state of an upstream light beam.
Knowing the polarisation state of a light beam, an image or a light source proves to be important not only in many scientific instrumentation fields, as for example astronomy or microscopy, but also for many applications as target detection or automated vision.
For that purpose, different types of polarimetric analysis devices, or polarimeters, may be implemented. Among them, the wavefront-division polarimeters (also called “aperture-division” polarimeters) appear as being particularly interesting when the matter is to determine quasi-simultaneously the polarisation states of different points of an object.